IN olden days a glimpse of stocking was something shocking, and in 1975, Ter-
rence McNally’s “The Ritz,” with its wisecracking, half-naked gay men, still registered high on the shock meter.
But it was so innocently funny – and with the gays, perhaps sufficiently, if defensively, stereotyped for straight Broadway to accept with a knowing chuckle – that it was a hit.
Today, in a post-AIDS world, it’s a different proposition. And it is different – it’s even funnier.
It also has a great cast led by Kevin Chamberlin as a Cleveland businessman seeking shelter from a mob hit in a gay bathhouse, where Rosie Perez is the fantabulous Googie Gomez, star of the in-house nightclub (shades of Bette Midler, minus the talent).
McNally’s written the best Feydeau farce since Feydeau, where eccentrics in seedy hotels chase one another wildly in search of love, or at least sex, in a merry-go-round of misunderstanding.
Where McNally trumps Feydeau is in having Googie mistake the businessman for a Broadway producer, with hilarious consequences.
McNally’s animated cartoons – Claude, the chubby chaser who can get it on only with fatties; Michael, the detective with biceps and a soprano (no, not those Sopranos) voice – are grotesque, absurd, but never unkind.
McNally has wisely left the play a period piece. Some references may now need Shakespearean-like textual notes: How many recall the days when cabbies wouldn’t change anything larger than a $5 bill, or remember After Dark magazine, or the names Tex Antoine or Zinka Milanov?
Scott Pask has done a lovely job with the setting, an arrangement of doors, cubicles and stairs straight out of a modern-day Dante’s Inferno, while William Ivey Long’s costumes – down to Long’s short towels – meet every requirement.
Director Joe Mantello, always in tune with McNally, has gotten a perfect ensemble performance. The adorable Chamberlin is pitch-perfect as Proclo, the harassed businessman beset by slowly dawning misunderstandings and fear of sudden death.
At times, he seems to channel Jack Weston’s performance in the original (there was later a movie), but Chamberlin has a silly sweetness all his own.
Brooks Ashmanskas is all high spirits and girlish self-assurance as Chris, self-appointed queen of the night; Patrick Kerr is splendid in his single-minded quest for masculine weight; Terrence Riordan is handsomely naive as the dim, high-voiced detective; Lenny Venito is finely grotesque as the businessman’s brother-in-law; and Ashlie Atkinson is properly conflicted as Proclo’s wife.
But if you need just one reason to visit “The Ritz,” I can give it to you in two words: Rosie Perez.
Her marvelously mangled medley of Broadway hits is in itself worth the price of admission: She never puts a wrong note right in a virtuoso hit parade of the absurd.
Googie deserves Broadway, but does Broadway deserve Googie?
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